Grappling With The Logic, Of All We Once Held True
by define-serenity
Summary: [Barry/Caitlin] No two days ago Barry had been another face, another body in a hospital bed not unlike Dr Wells during his recovery. She'd sat by his side day in day out, Cisco hovering somewhere close, the thought of sitting home alone crippling her to the point of paralysis. She didn't think she could do it again for Barry. Not after Ronnie. ONESHOT. COMPLETE.


pre-relationship Barry/Caitlin, 1293 words, pg-rated.

this came out of nowhere after watching _The Flash_ pilot. i made a lot of inferences about Caitlin's background not rooted in canon at all, so it's all speculation, but eh, go with it? my first foray in this fandom, so be gentle? title taken from _(Entropology)_ by School Is Cool.

.

_**Grappling With the Logic, of All We Once Held True**_

.

"Hey, you okay?"

It's not the most shocking question, in the grander scheme of things.

No two days ago Barry had been another face, another body in a hospital bed not unlike Dr Wells during his recovery. She'd sat by his side day in day out, Cisco hovering somewhere close, the thought of sitting home alone twisting her ring round and round along the length of her ring finger crippling her to the point of paralysis. She didn't think she could do it again for Barry, not after the explosion, not after all the colleagues she buried, the friends. Not after Ronnie.

Barry proved different, he had other people to sit by his bedside and tell him stories; Detective West kept quiet for the most part, he spoke in hushed tones and whispered the likes of, "We miss you, son, come back to us soon, okay?" while his daughter, Iris, talked and talked about times long gone, adventures they went on as kids, things they had yet to do, places they had yet to see. Iris cried a lot, too, even though she did her best to hide it.

It was comforting to simply be the one to change Barry's IV, check his vitals for changes, monitor brain and heart function and logging that all into the computer; it had a rhythm and a rhyme, something that made sense amidst the chaos of Harrison still knocking things over with his wheelchair, Cisco rewiring the electrics that fried in the explosion, rebuilding the lab she'd come to see as a second home.

With Barry now awake, and all the impossible discoveries that followed, her world's on shaky grounds again. What little time she didn't spend at the lab she passed in restless slumber in a bed too big for her alone, sat nursing a glass of red wine while her dad spoke on the phone, or replayed different versions of the same event over and over behind closed eyes. Her world burnt slowly at the seams, and little stood to withstand the flames.

"Yeah," Barry answers, elbows on his knees, hands linked underneath his chin.

She sits down next to Barry, Cisco rambling about memory processors and accelerator coils in the next room, and she can't help but wonder what Barry's world has turned into. For any other person a nine-month coma would've had disastrous consequences, his muscles would be atrophied, requiring weeks or months of physical therapy to get going again. Instead he got powers beyond imagining.

Who knows what Barry Allen's world looks like upside down.

"We can hold off on the rest of the tests," she says, just as Barry confesses, "_I saw my dad yesterday_."

"Oh." She stares down at the tablet in her lap and picks at her nails, too tempted to give the ring around her finger another spin, an endless whirl moved by her own distress. "Did you tell him?"

"No." Barry shakes his head and rubs the back of his neck. "No, I don't want to get his hopes up. He already thinks I sacrificed everything."

She frowns, having lost the train of the conversation faster than she thought possible. In the grander scheme of things, this is not what she expected to talk about when she posed her initial question. "What do you mean?"

Barry sighs, eyes on an unfixed point in the center of the room. "My whole life people have been telling me that what I saw wasn't real. That my dad killed my mom. No one believed me. Not the police, not the doctors. Iris did, but–"

She swallows hard, her heart curling around the pity and sympathy threatening to spill through her veins at the sound of this story yet again – she can't take Barry's pain too, not over something that happened fourteen years ago, not even if it's still happening inside Barry's heart right at this moment. There have been too many burials, too many memorials, too many condolences and, "It was an accident," shot into her like arrows, puncturing the seemingly steeled countenance she perfected over the years.

"They all think I'm obsessed."

It takes her a shamefully long time to realize what Barry's talking about, what his supposed sacrifice entails, a life devoted to fighting crime when he has so much potential – Barry's smart and kind and generous, he's a loyal friend and a good son, an overall more decent person than most people she's ever met. And he chose to dedicate his life to solving crime, chasing strange cases all over the country. Cisco found Barry's blog a week after he got transferred from the hospital and it hadn't made much sense at the time, why a bright young guy like Barry would spend so much time putting unexplainable puzzles together. Now it does.

"Maybe I am obsessed."

"Barry, you were in a coma for nine months, and the first thing you did when you found out you had these abilities was take down a bank robber. A murderer. That was you, not some obsession, or– _The Flash_." The name doesn't quite roll off her tongue the way it does Cisco's or Barry's. God only knows what inspired Barry to name himself. "That was Barry Allen."

"What are you saying?"

"Do you like what you do? Working at the crime lab?"

"Yeah," Barry breathes, eyes unsure on where to settle, as if no one's ever asked him the question before, but rather assumed the crime lab is where he'd always end up, in every possible iteration of his life unfolding. "It's what I've always wanted to do. And I'm good at what I do."

Maybe it hadn't always been Barry's dream to end up in law enforcement; she likes the idea of young Barry wanting to be an astronaut or a pet detective, or maybe even a doctor of some kind. But people are shaped by the things life throws at them, tragedy as well as victory, and it's the choices they make in the wake of them that determine their future, what builds heroes, what creates villains, and the only thing she's absolutely sure about, in a sheltered place where her empathy reigns freely, is that Barry Allen was always destined to be a hero. Flash, or no Flash.

"Then it's not a sacrifice."

Barry looks at her sideways.

"It's a calling," she says, the sentiment echoing somewhere in her past, when her eight-year old self's voice demanded she follow a career path to appease an absent mother all in the hopes of bringing her back. But medicine wasn't her thing, it wasn't her calling, she preferred the logic chemistry, biology and physics provided, not the human body.

"Thanks, Caitlin," Barry says, a frown knit between his eyebrows, as if he can't quite rhyme her words with what he knows about her.

It's safe to say that ever since Barry Allen came into her life she's made herself adaptable. Barry defied the laws of science, if not all then definitely most of them, and that made her more uncomfortable than she cared to admit.

.

.

_**fin**_


End file.
